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GameCentral reviews the month’s new iOS and Android games, from Assassin’s Creed Rebellion to the surprisingly good Command & Conquer: Rivals.

The catharsis of a good blast on a video game is something that can now be experienced both on the train to an elderly relative’s house and on the lavatory. There’s not much more Christmas you can get than the need to escape for a few minutes, and mobile gaming rarely has you well covered this month, which sees an unusual welter of quality titles to help you while away the days before the teeth-grinding austerity of dry January. Bask in the fascinatingly modelled complexity of Rebel Inc and the sheer blissful insanity of CHUCHEL while you eat, drink, and get merry.

Kingdom Rush Vengeance for iOS & Android, £4.99 (Ironhide Studios)

Building on the mechanics of the last three Kingdom Rush outings, Vengeance is still a Tower Defense game and retains its set of well-designed turrets; only this time you can access the their special abilities right from the start, rather than being forced to choose a specialism when you max them out. It also adds 12 completely new towers, five of which are rather controversially pay-walled.

Its cartoonish good looks and well-orchestrated upgrade path are as awesome as ever, but to go with the paid towers there are also heroes to buy and special weapons that cost gems; some of which you earn at the end of each round, but never enough to keep you going if you use them regularly. Watching ads and charging for extras in a paid game feels stingy, but they’re optional extras you really don’t need.

Vengeance’s 12 or so hours of entertainment are joyous, and speeding through them with paid upgrades is a fool’s errand. This is still the very pinnacle of the Tower Defense genre and even if you completely ignore its microtransactions, it’s a superb game.

Score: 8/10

Teslagrad for iOS and Android, £4.99 (Playdigious)

Ported from the identically named PC and console game, Teslagrad is a 2D platformer that uses magnetism to solve its puzzles. Picking up a pair of electric gloves that let you reverse the polarity of objects, you can make blocks attract or repel those nearby. This lets you shift obstacles, boost yourself up onto platforms, and generally adapt the world to your ongoing need to keep scrolling right.

The charmingly dark and brooding graphic style works nicely with the fizzing electromagnetism of each level, but it’s undone by the touchscreen controls. The demanding, pixel-perfect jumps you need to pull off to complete platform sections immediately rendered exasperating by the woolly onscreen joystick and buttons. It’s not in any way a dead loss, but without a physical joypad you should brace yourself for irritation.

Score: 6/10

Alphaputt for iOS, £3.99 (Sennep)

Looking beautiful, each of Alphaputt’s levels is a perfectly drawn work of graphic art, as well as a distinct and challenging mini-golf course featuring a variety of moving and interactive elements. The twist is that rounds of golf are played as words, with each letter its own course to play through. You can type your own or choose from a scrolling tapestry of words of differing lengths.

The result isn’t quite the sum of its parts unfortunately, because although each course looks stunning, rounds have an unfortunate tendency to be frustrating, the random factor underpinning victory just slightly too prominently. That’s actually quite a good analogue for real world crazy golf courses, and if you enjoy that element in the digital world this will seem pretty great.

Score: 7/10

Hyper Sentinel for iOS, £1.99 (Huey Games)

Not so much channelling the spirit of Commodore 64 classic Uridium, as acting as an unofficial second sequel, Hyper Sentinel will take you straight back to the 1980s. Its 8-bit styling is pretty much unchanged, but a few differences have crept in during the intervening decades.

Firstly, one hit is no longer death, and to add to your longevity your ship also has a brief period of invisibility when you flip its direction, a facility you can exploit for moments of near-invincibility. There are also bosses at the end of each level, and power-ups, albeit a fairly limited selection. But its throwaway arcade action hasn’t aged well and is easily bettered by more refined takes on the scrolling shooter, like Super Hydorah or the Sky Force games.

Score: 6/10

Command & Conquer: Rivals for iOS & Android, £Free (EA)

EA have endeared themselves to few gamers with what’s widely perceived as a relentless drive towards monetisation even if it means steamrolling gameplay along the way. With that in mind Command & Conquer: Rivals starts with no surprises: skinner boxes, card-levelling that’s ultra slow at higher levels, and a shop that lets you buy extremely powerful units for cash.

However, actually playing the game reveals a more nuanced and tactical experience than its freemium trappings might lead you to expect. Taking the original Command & Conquer’s resource-gathering and total control of every unit, Rivals gives it a mobile spin, which while simplified and shortened still allows considerable space for skill and strategy in its rock-paper-scissors PvP engagements.

Yes, you can still be brutalised by higher level players, but most matches don’t feel that way, and real-time strategy fans aren’t exactly spoiled for choice on mobile, making Rivals well worth trying out.

Score: 7/10

Cat Lady for iOS, £1.99 (Nomad Games)

In Cat Lady your job is to populate and feed a cattery by collecting moggies, each of which has feeding preferences that you need to match by acquiring compatible food items. You do that by harvesting a row or column of cards from a 3×3 grid, while taking turns with up to three computer or flesh and blood opponents.

Once all the cards in the deck have been taken the player with the happiest, best fed cats wins the game. It may be turn-based and lack any sort of time restriction, but it’s also highly competitive, with a distinct stab of angst when another player steals the very line of food and felines you’d nervously been eyeing. Sadly, it’s also riddled with bugs, many of which force you to restart the app, something that with any luck will be addressed in an update.

Score: 7/10

CHUCHEL for iOS & Android, £4.99 (Amanita Design)

Riffing on old Amanita games like Machinarium and Samorost, and with the human-generated sound effects that were stapes of the NotCoD games of yore, CHUCHEL also sets its sights on a vast array of entertainment properties. Those include Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ice Age, Pac-Man, Angry Birds, Space Invaders, and Flappy Bird, to name a selection that pop up in the first hour or so.

It’s very much its own game however, its Czech roots evident in both its art style and slapstick sense of humour, which features a much rowdier demeanour than past games from the studio. CHUCHEL is an irreverent, surreal rollercoaster ride that never lets ideas or cultural references outstay their welcome.

Score: 8/10

Golf Peaks for iOS & Android, £2.99 (Lukasz Spierewka)

More golf, but this time in a turn-based puzzle game rather than anything to do with timing and dexterity. In Golf Peaks you’re dealt a series of cards marked with different distances, showing you how many squares your ball will fly and how far it will then roll. On the ground there’s a Q*bert-style isometric grid containing slopes, ledges and different surfaces that make your ball drift further than usual or stop it in its tracks.

Your job is to navigate these conditions using the available shot cards to get your ball from the tee to the hole. There’s not much finesse beyond that, with each level having a single solution which doesn’t leave a lot of room for creativity, but as a pick up and play mobile puzzle game this ticks the right boxes: levels are short and satisfying to crack, and its cute graphics are just enough to give you an impression of golf.

Score: 7/10

Assassin’s Creed Rebellion, £Free for iOS & Android (Ubisoft)

Introduced by Ezio Auditore da Firenze, everyone’s favourite assassin, Rebellion is a new free-to-play take on Assassin’s Creed with Animus data cubes standing in for loot boxes. Missions take place in a series of rooms into which you send one of your team of stealthy killers, their interactions with traps, enemies, and treasure chests marked by a probability indicating their chances of success.

Your limited agency in this is to choose the right team for the job, and the best team member for each room, beyond that it’s all down to luck. As usual there are countdown timers attached to everything that’s critical to progress, from healing assassins to crafting equipment to training. Although at least you’re not forced to watch any ads apart from the ones entreating you to spend money at the in-game store.

It has extremely high production values, but the lack of skill needed and the emphasis on waiting for absolutely everything limit its appeal.

Score: 5/10

Rebel Inc. for iOS & Android, £1.99 (Ndemic Creations)

From the people who brought you the superb Plague Inc., a game in which you control a viral infection attempting to destroy humanity, Rebel Inc. casts you as the good guy, attempting to wrest control of a region using military intervention and wise investment in winning hearts and minds.

That involves launching civilian initiatives to improve healthcare, sanitation and infrastructure, increasing local support; military operations to stamp out insurgency and bring areas back under your control, and government schemes that quash corruption and speed up your other plans.

There are all sorts of decisions to make: should you try and cover up the civilian casualties from a stray airstrike or fess up, lowering support? Will you educate farmers on use of pesticides, or offer passive advice? It sounds dry, but once you’re in the thick of it, using the game’s myriad social and political leavers to lessen the chaos, it’s utterly gripping and offers layers of extra complexity over Plague Inc.’s already highly compelling ruleset.